THE VEGAS EXODUS OF THE A’S: SAVE YOUR TEARS FOR REAL-LIFE HEARTBREAK
Owners don’t care about fans, as John Fisher has shown definitively in letting his MLB team rot in a dilapidated stadium — and it’s time to stop “falling in love” with greed-driven sports franchises
When a sports fan expresses heartbreak over a carpetbagging franchise, I direct that poor soul to a children’s hospital. Or to a homeless encampment. Or to the 9/11 Memorial Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Or to a morning of layoffs at a Fortune 500 corporation. Or to a grief outpouring after another mass shooting. Or to a bride or groom ghosted at the altar, awaiting details by text.
There are legitimate reasons to spill tears in a lifetime. Losing a baseball team to Las Vegas is not among them.
The days of viewing professional sports as a fun-and-frivolity sandbox, with organizations as our extended families, ended when the industry crashed the $700-billion threshold, hellbent on $1 trillion. The mission isn’t a nice trophy ceremony at season’s end. It’s about savage businesspeople, within leagues or in accompanying media and casinos, trying to squeeze as much revenue from these ventures as humanly — or sub-humanly — possible. Anyone who thinks it’s still about parents taking kids to a ballpark in a Pleasantville throwback, maybe meeting a mascot, isn’t living in the third decade of the 21st century.
The big game is American capitalism, baby.
This is not a cynical view, despite protests from fanboys/girls, sportswriters under 40 and others stuck in arrested adolescence. This is unapologetic reality, an acceptance that franchises will be moved by cold-blooded opportunists who don’t care about the emotional and physical wreckage left behind. No fewer than 25 teams in the four major North American leagues — including the Golden State Warriors and Colorado Avalanche, both defending championships this spring — have relocated from other cities. As the Lakers and Grizzlies spew trash-talk in their NBA playoff series, who remembers that they moved to Los Angeles and Memphis from Minneapolis and Vancouver? The Atlanta Braves are eyeing their second World Series title in three seasons, light years from their Milwaukee and Boston roots. When the L.A. Rams won a Super Bowl in their fresh $6-billion palace, constructed with the Walmart riches of their Missouri-bred owner, a jilted St. Louis sued and seethed, recalling how the Rams were welcomed under the Gateway Arch when they moved from Anaheim, where they moved from L.A.
So when the Oakland Athletics agreed this week to acquire land by the Vegas strip, where they would use tax credits of $500 million to play on hot desert nights under a retractable roof, why grieve the news? The address change has been inevitable since the U.S. Supreme Court whipped open previously locked doors to legalized gambling in 2018, which allowed hyperventilating leagues and media interests to lift the forbidden clouds over Sin City and plant stakes in a new sports hotbed. Major League Baseball was coming, even amid the hypocrisy of Pete Rose’s lifetime ban for gambling. Once the NFL Raiders arrived in 2020 from the East Bay, it was a matter of time before the A’s followed. Anyone who didn’t notice wasn’t paying attention, or was paralyzed in foolish denial.
“This is a massive deal for our franchise and for the whole league,” said team president Dave Kaval, who is absorbing the collateral fallout as owner John Fisher remains pathetically reclusive and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred celebrates with office backflips.
To which a group of A’s fans, called Rooted In Oakland, responded in deep mourning: “We are absolutely disgusted and heartbroken to hear the news that the Oakland A’s will be building a new stadium in Las Vegas. It is truly a heartbreaking day for Oakland A’s fans.”
One man’s heartbreak is a smarter man’s pragmatism.
Been to Oakland lately? It’s a cool, gritty town but unsustainable as a major-league sports hub. It’s the capital of the Other Side of the Bay, which always will be orphanized by all things across the water, one reason the Warriors swam to a new building there once they started winning titles in the mid-2010s. San Francisco, and the surrounding peninsula and Golden Gate Bridge destinations, have the prestige and money and tech gravitas, despite the despair and detritus in the city streets. People weeping about the exodus of the Warriors, Raiders and A’s are ignoring common sense and statistical shifts. The Bay Area, once the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area, has priced out too many residents and fallen behind the Dallas, Houston, Washington and Philadelphia regions in population, with Atlanta and South Florida not far behind. None are two-team cities in any sport, and other than New York, the truth is that no market can support more than one healthy MLB franchise. Ask the Chicago White Sox, who don’t draw well in a Cubs town and have suffered a substantial recent plunge in local TV subscriptions. In L.A., the Dodgers dominate the landscape 32 miles from a cultural moat in Orange County, where Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout may as well make history on another planet.
The Bay Area didn’t need two MLB teams or two NFL teams. Vegas is the willing cherry-picker, a convenient escape hatch across the Nevada line, I-880 to I-580 to I-5, veer left in Bakersfield. The market will be the smallest in the majors and is very much grounded in the casino industry, but the NFL already has reaped the benefits of frolic-seekers making road trips. Can MLB do the same? An 81-game home season creates challenges mightier than eight or nine football games, but put it this way: At least there’s hope now, on 49 neon-lit acres, as a destination and a novelty. Oakland qualifies as neither.
What galls us about Fisher, the billionaire heir to the Gap Inc. clothing fortune, is his naked shame as an unscrupulous sports schemer. Always a payroll penny-pincher, he spent years piggybacking the “Moneyball” mantra of Billy Beane, who won industry acclaim and Hollywood fame as a baseball man who somehow made the most of deficient resources. But Fisher never understood the politics of California and stadium deals: If you want a shiny, new ballpark, it will not come unless you build it. The Giants realized it in San Francisco, where they built a masterpiece on the water, as did the Warriors years later. The owner behind the basketball arena, Joe Lacob, offered to buy the A’s and keep them on the current Coliseum lot with a new stadium. If Fisher truly cared about Oakland and the fans, he would have sold to Lacob.
Instead, while waging a phony fight with the city about a new waterfront ballpark, Fisher let his franchise rot away in a dilapidated Coliseum. No dummy, he knew a solution was 560 miles away in Vegas, and surely he was more than nudged by a gambling-obsessed Manfred, whose reign has been impeded by the stadium dramas of the A’s and Tampa Bay Rays. But that’s no excuse for an owner to withdraw from public view, to the point fans don’t know what Fisher looks like. While continuing to pocket revenue-sharing millions from annoyed fellow owners — with a dead-last, $50-million payroll when the New York Mets might spend $500 million this season — he still managed to report a $62.2 million profit last season, fifth-highest among the 30 teams.
You’ve seen the movie “Major League.” Fisher is the real-life Rachel Phelps. He dumped elite young players when it was time to pay them, just as fans were becoming attached. The Coliseum, which turns 60 in three years, has reeked of raw sewage, dead animals and the remnants of Jose Canseco’s steroids syringes. This year’s team has started 4-16 and probably is one of the worst in baseball history, yet he still managed to raise ticket prices, further alienating locals who leave 34,000 available seats in a 63,132-capacity monstrosity all but empty. This is his way of punishing Oakland politicians for not giving him a better deal for a proposed waterfront ballpark, with a gondola — insert laughtrack here — delivering ticket-holders from a transit station. The project, at Howard Terminal, never was going to happen. Fisher’s former partner, Lew Wolff, said so when he sold his ownership share in 2016.
That was seven years ago, folks. Anyone who has rooted for this team since then should consider it wasted time in a life of limited expectancy. Now, Vegas is left to wonder if Fisher — after taking his half-billion bucks (or more) from a “public-private partnership” — will be just as cheap season after season, which won’t work when the Raiders, the NHL’s Golden Knights and an impending NBA expansion franchise will gun for championships. In the end, Oakland’s loss might be its ultimate gain … to Vegas’ detriment. For now, people are mad in one city, and suspicious in the other. Is Fisher really going to fork out $1 billion for a $1.5-billion ballpark? The state of Nevada should examine the final bill carefully before signing. For certain, Fisher won’t have a friendly partner in Raiders owner Mark Davis, who carries long memories about Oakland and vented to the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing. The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well, all they did was f—k the Bay Area. For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty (screwed) up.”
Though Davis is grandstanding to a degree — he did leave, after all — Oakland’s mayor obviously agrees. “I am deeply disappointed that the A's have chosen not to negotiate with the City of Oakland as a true partner, in a way that respects the long relationship between the fans, the City and the team,” said Sheng Thao, ending negotiations when there never were any. “It is clear to me that the A's have no intention of staying in Oakland and have simply been using this process to try to extract a better deal out of Las Vegas. I am not interested in continuing to play that game — the fans and our residents deserve better.”
The gushy concept of “falling in love” with a sports team, as I keep hearing from innocents who still believe in fairy tales and a ripoff-free world, should end right here and now. The A’s never were staying in the East Bay. They always were fleeing, along with the other two dozen franchises that left markets, just as this team always was leaving Kansas City and Philadelphia before that. Yes, kids, the soon-to-be Las Vegas A’s once played for a manager named Connie Mack on the East Coast, as recently as the 1950s. Wonder if John Fisher knows that?
“It’s a sad day for our fans in Oakland,” Kaval said. “We’ve been here for almost 60 years and we have a tremendous amount of gratitude for Oakland providing us a home for all these years at the Coliseum. Incredible memories.”
And incredible b.s.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.